Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday March 27, 2010 @01:48AM
from the what-will-child-services-say dept.

An anonymous reader writes "SVG has been a published standard for almost a decade. Microsoft has had nothing to do with it, even while every other major browser adopted SVG as a supported format and interface. Just in the last few weeks, though, Microsoft has thrown a surprising amount of its weight behind SVG." This means for IE 9, but it's a start.

It's just more mulling over the recently released IE9 preview, which went through the/. torture rack pretty much as soon as it was announced. SVG support was already there, and was discussed alongside all the other newly supported standards, so what's the point of TFS?

Yeah I was thinking pretty much the same thing, but this is another article for a difference crowd with its own purpose. And with all that said, perhaps it's time to put Microsoft's SVG implementation through the/. torture rack.

Even during the previous article's discussion, a question on my mind (that I was afraid would have been modded offtopic) was "how faithful will their implementaiton of SVG be?" Microsoft is quite famous for doing things in such a way that it makes the world believe everyone else is broken. So now I am left to wonder about this too.

Yes, the SVG support in the Platform Preview is definitely a work in progress; it really should be viewed as an early alpha in overall completeness and quality. However, MS has apparently committed to a full and proper SVG implementation in IE9. Some links worth checking out:

If you look at Haavard's blog [opera.com] on the Opera site, you will find a reference to run of the SVG 1.1 Test Suite on IE9 [codedread.com]. In contrast to Microsoft's SVG test suite (of about 104 individual tests in 7 areas), the W3C's test suite has 275 tests, each of which typically has a dozen or so subtests. On the standard test, IE9 passed 28.36 % of the tests. All other browsers are above 60%. Once SVG becomes viable, I expect that all of the other browsers will quickly advance into the 90%+ range. Opera is already wel

A skeptic, that is to say, anyone who can recall Microsoft's behavior over the past 20 years, might wonder if Microsoft ran the official SVG test suite on all competing browsers to find areas where they failed. They then built a second test where they know the others will fail.

You mean like Hickson did with Acid3? Whatever set of tests you're using, if they're incomplete (and they always will be), they will be biased in terms of coverage. Some test suites like Acid3 are meant as a bludgeon to wag the dog of a competitor or certain organization, some are designed to ensure that features you care about are supported in they way you believe they should be, and others are just QA guys doing their best to make sure their product works. In any event, whichever set of tests you code

More likely: Microsoft identified areas they thought were important. They then made plans to implement and test those areas. Once the implementation was done and the tests passed (thereby 'validating' the tests) they were submitted to the working group. Tests can be tricky to write and it is a good idea to make sure they work as expected before putting them into production. It shouldn't be a surprise that tests submitted by Microsoft work on IE9.

I don't find this surprising. It's a policy Microsoft has used since circa 1990:

EMBRACE an existing standard/format that has gained popularity.

EXTEND the format with new functions which are copyrighted by Microsoft, so competing products can't display the pages properly.

EXTINGUISH the competing companies by telling users that those companies' products only provide half the functionality, therefore you should use Microsoft's product. And oh yeah, MS provides it for free with Windows, so it's doubleplus goo

And with all that said, perhaps it's time to put Microsoft's SVG implementation through the/. torture rack.

Not necessary - here is a nice comparision for all current browser implementations of SVG and how much tests of the official SVG test suite they pass : SVG Implementation Table [codedread.com]. If you click on the chart you get a very detailed view.

That isn't working very well since we entered the FOSS era. MS simply can't extinguish FOSS, they can at best reprime it. And a repressed competitor will be foverever a source of costs, an extict one will not.

this follows on the earlier announcement to support more HTML5 features on IE9. after killing netscape, IE has managed to thwart other upcoming browsers by tweaking standards in a way that developers specifically for IE and other standard compatible browser's rendering looked bad. now this was a fine business strategy except that the browser just refused to evolve. firefox happened followed by safari, chrome, etc. heck, even opera is getting more attention now, especially with euro mandated browser raffle for windows. now IE strategy of not following standards is stacking up against it, with some markets have IE share dropped to less that 50. it is trying to catch up now and actually have the audacity to suggest that they are doing a better job of following the standards, a case in point the adoption of long desired css border-radius.
anyway, developers are 1 step closer to worry less about cross browser compatibility (cbc) and more about design and development

Browsing is also mobile browsing nowadays. Microsoft has not the capability any more to impose technologies (Silverlight etc.) on users any more. If 50% of the devices dont support your webpage and never will, you can not ignore any mor anybody who can not install some plugin. Morover IE is also loosing foothold on the desktop. So what was a move to hinder a competitor seriously (Why should i embed SVG on webpage if IE can not view it?) is slowly becoming a disadvantage. If Firefox and google chrome get the image of "just working fine" when compared to the IE and IE gets the image of causing problems, then they can stop making IE9.

SVG graphics on web pages is simply the most appropriate thing. Web developers/designers all over have been chomping at the bit to use SVG because the results are beautiful and scalable. MSIE support is and has been the one thing preventing them from actually doing it.

Yeah, but.... a lot of companies have dropped their SVG support after MS (or was it Adobe) decided to stop supporting their SVG plugin.

Now IE9 will have native SVG support, that just means *most* browsers will have it (ie not IE7 or 8), which still means that it is not widespread enough for adoption. Maybe in a few years when everyone has migrated from IE8 to 9, but you know how long that will be. In the meantime, all the other browsers will be running something much better like webGL and MS will be still p

Google provides a JavaScript library [google.com] that renders SVG using native support if present or Flash if not. This works in IE. I wouldn't be surprised if MS decided to support SVG in response to this; it's one more reason for keeping the Flash plugin (which competes with Silverlight) installed.

I'm a web developer and sometimes I only have to target Firefox and I've never been able to figure out how to use an SVG file in an HTML document. It's not supported by the IMG tag, you can can't use it as a CSS background, etc. It's a confusing as hell technology that hasn't taken off because figuring out how to use it on a page is way too complicated.

Browsing is also mobile browsing nowadays. Microsoft has not the capability any more to impose technologies (Silverlight etc.) on users any more. If 50% of the devices dont support your webpage and never will, you can not ignore any mor anybody who can not install some plugin. Morover IE is also loosing foothold on the desktop. So what was a move to hinder a competitor seriously (Why should i embed SVG on webpage if IE can not view it?) is slowly becoming a disadvantage. If Firefox and google chrome get the image of "just working fine" when compared to the IE and IE gets the image of causing problems, then they can stop making IE9.

The mobile space really is exploding. Smart phones were fairly useless for the longest time but the tech has really matured. They're very useful machines. And with the prevalence of non-Windows netbooks, there's more and more pressure for true interoperability.

Your browser might be picking the wrong mime type for SVG. I can't find the details, but I recall that an early Adobe tool established 'image/svg-xml' in the windows registry, and firefox will inherit that; changing it to 'image/svg+xml' should fix things (I suppose installing a later version of the Adobe SVG plugin should also do that, who knows).

There appears to be an inverse relationship between IE market share and its implementation of standards. Applaud MS for good decisions, but never forget how they acted when they owned the market.

I mostly share your perspective, but I must admit from a business point of view it made perfect business sense for Microsoft to drag their heels for as long as they basically had a monopoly on the web browser market. Why should a company with 90+% share support standards? There's no real advantage to them - all implementing better standards support would do is make it less painful for users to try another browser.

But as a web developer, I am much happier being able to code for IE8 than I was for IE7. But let's not forget that IE8 still lags all other browsers in terms of standards support. Saying "they certainly suck less than they used to" is most assuredly damning with faint praise... but it's the truth. Oh, additionally, I will say that developing IE workarounds for our internal pages and systems takes less time now, since (for those anyway) I can say "sorry, we only support the latest version of IE".

I mostly share your perspective, but I must admit from a business point of view it made perfect business sense for Microsoft to drag their heels for as long as they basically had a monopoly on the web browser market. Why should a company with 90+% share support standards? There's no real advantage to them - all implementing better standards support would do is make it less painful for users to try another browser.

Close, but you're missing the point that, at 90+% market share, you are the standard.

"If MS had built a solid OS instead of focusing on short-term profits from office lock-in they'd be what they wanted, the core of every new device."

No great OS would be able to get a monopoly-like adoption on even PC desktops. The reason is that users have disparate needs, and only lock-in can make they agree on a pltaform. A great OS has no lock-in, by definition.

See how many different distros are used just on the ninche ocupied by Linux. One company would never be able to do all those tasks equaly well.

This is "business" in the sense of "profit is the objective, morals are not factored in".

The more consumers accept this kind of attitude, the more they will get it.

You know, as it turns out, even from the perspective of pure profit, adhering to standards still makes sense. (To the degree that consumers have some brains.) You can build customer loyalty by proving yourself to be in a symbiotic relationship with them. Conversely, Microsoft has made me an adversary. Would I be so strongly opposed to using M

A better question is, when one product holds 90%+ market share, why would any sane standards body create something different? If IE had 90% of the market share, the standard should have been very close to IE's behavior at the time. In any other industry, standards bodies exist to codify existing practices, not invent new ones. That's how you create a standard with minimal disruption. Instead we're in a situation where more than a decade later, there still isn't agreement in web browser behavior for the majo

Loss of market share is certainly a factor in this. But not the only one.

One big factor is all the legal and political pressure to play nice with others. One result is that browser choice screen that EU customers get. Another is the fact that they've given no preference to their new free antivirus software; not so long ago, they would have just added it to the Windows install and ignored the complaints.

But I think the biggest change is a cultural shift among all software people. Engineers use to be a lot mo

The problem with standards is that they're generally designed more by the losers than by the winners.

The argument could be made that, given that at the time they were being devised IE had almost 90% of the market share, that at least some of the IE way ought to have been the standard. After all, Netscape was as guilty of changing and polluting the web standards as anyone else back in those days.

While there are certainly some things in IE which are just strange(the way it handles the z-axis for instance isn'

That was caused by losing some market share, rest assured, but the change is a bit deeper than that. Just ask yourself what Microsoft gains publishing IE. The answer used to be that they wated to stop the Web from developing, but now that they are losing market share they aren't able to do that anymore. So why launch a new version?

IE is now the prefered front-end of all Microsoft web services (the ones for the cloud and the ones for the LAN), owning the front end gives them the oportunity to make a much bet

it's their only business model... SVG is the new target to pervert. Expect their web development tools to produce subtly broken SVG that only renders correctly on the IE version... they did the exact same with html. They will go to great lengths to ensure their development tools produce websites that don't work right on other browsers. Ever such subtle glitches, but the users will end up blaming the other browser that they picked on the ballot page.

Call me a suspicious paranoid old bugger, but if you been buggered by someone decades, you tend to grow a bit cautious.

The more I read about IE9, the more I wonder "what's the catch". Because MS finally getting it and playing nice just doesn't seem to be an option.

And low and behold. No IE9 for XP, despite it still being sold by MS and still being widely used. The excuse: "we can't because we are only a multi-billion dollar company and can't afford to hire the very best and just make it work".

An MS apologists commented on the last article that it was impossible to run IE9 under XP because of the hardware rendering... clearly he doesn't know that A: DirectX entire point was to abstract hardware to the point it also (used to) support it purely running in software mode" and B: That all the other browsers have no such problem.

No, I see MS making the same mistake they made countless time before. Not killing of their old crap. Learn to clean up after yourself. You dumped IE6-7-8 on the world, now get rid of them.

It would be doable for MS, and they are not. Why? Because they are still the same old "can't do" company. MS apologists and the naive jumped in Windows Mobile 7 to, and then finally it was announced, no multi-tasking and no copy&past... so it was just like all the releases before, fundemental things that WERE PROMISED, not making it into the release.

So, I am going to see what MS finally delivers. Their promises have no value.

An MS apologists commented on the last article that it was impossible to run IE9 under XP because of the hardware rendering... clearly he doesn't know that A: DirectX entire point was to abstract hardware to the point it also (used to) support it purely running in software mode" and B: That all the other browsers have no such problem.

This is where people get confused so easily. For IE9 to work on XP, they would have to recreate the WDDM for XP. And when you do that, there are things in the WDDM that other levels of the OS do not have or understand, so essentially you are having to build XP into Vista.

This is why DX10 was impossible on XP as well, as the XPDM does not handle the low level video functions the same way nor do they have the features that are expected that the WDDM provides like VRAM virtualization and GPU Scheduling/Thread

I'm not a Windows programmer, or even a Windows user. How is it that so many other companies are able to support Windows XP with their new products? I mean even looking specifically at browsers...Chrome supports Windows XP SP2 through Window 7, and Firefox supports Windows 2000 through Windows 7.
Is IE in Windows 7 really so much better than Firefox or Chrome in Windows 7 that it was worth exploiting features of Windows Vista/7 that aren't available in XP?

What are you babbling about. IT IS A BROWSER. Other browsers can support standards on XP, so why can't they? Opera/Firefox/Chome do it on various OS'es at the same time. So why can't MS?

Well maybe you should be paying attention to technology a bit more instead of ranting about crap you have no idea about.

IE9 uses an internal GPU assisted framework and GPU assitsted composer. This is why IE9 can animate complex SVG and HTML5 content on pages that make OTHER BROWSERS choke.

Since IE9 depends on the GPU 'assistance' it uses the framework and driver models of Vista and Win7 that allo the OS to share system RAM with the VRAM and gives the OS control over the 'scheduling' of the GPU.

Go look at how HTML evolved, and which browsers supported which features, and you'll see that they didn't do anything the other browser makers weren't also doing. Grab older editions of, say, O'Reilly's HTML Definitive Guide, and you'll find a large chunk of the tags are marked as non-standard Netscape extensions, for instance.

The web got big on these non-standard tags. Many eventually became standard (although sometimes in not quite compatible ways). The big difference between IE and the others is that Mic

The problem is not that other browsers implement their own standards. The problem is that Microsoft didn't implement the actual standards. Sure, Webkit creates their own "--webkit-border-radius" CSS-property, but which property is there for IE to do rounded borders? Nothing. There's a whole list of features which have long been supported in other browsers and could be used to make the web more awesome, but because IE supports none of these, they're holding back the development of the web as a whole.

Microsoft had announced it would join the SVG Working Group, and that IE9 would use Direct2D and DirectWrite (connect the two freakin' dots), weeks if not months ago. I hope others here are merely acting like SVG (of some sort) in IE9 is news, and not actually surprised with Acid3's breath behind their neck and all.

Now, a final version of IE9 with a perfect implem of the language, or one that rivals those of Firefox, Webkit, or Opera? That would be news.

Flash has opposition now from two technologies, one is SVG and the other is Silverlight. The timing is very logical since Apple doesn't support flash on it's IPhone and Ipad. Microsoft first has to remove Flash from it's dominant position. If that plan would work out in the future Microsoft can always choose to drop SVG support and pushing forward it's Silverlight.

Silverlight was not released just to watch movies and animations. Just because that's what Flash has devolved into over the years, doesn't mean that that's what Microsoft(or anyone else) wants to do with Silverlight(or JavaFX if it still exists).

Silverlight is aimed at creating Rich Internet Applications. It's more of an alternative to AJAX than to Flash because, while Flash can be used to create RIAs, no one does.

Unfortunately, the demo RIA for everyone of these platforms is a video player, mostly because it's dead simple, looks flashy and is something you can't do in Javascript, so everyone forgets that.

I really don't think that HTML5 and/or SVG taking over the animation or video playing market share is going to make any dent in Silverlight, because that's not what it was designed for.

Oh, I'm well aware you can do that. When I say that's what Flash has devolved to, I mean that it's essentially become almost synonymous with animations and video players.

People can build RIAs with it, and one could even argue that that was essentially its original intent, even before Flex, and some of what gets built in it is actually fairly good(barring the god awful design legacies Flash is stuck with from the hack jobs it took to make it work on the systems available when it began).

Imagine all those gradients and rounded corners - how they wasted so much pre-video bandwidth. Imagine the speed at which those pages could've loaded over a 56 kbps connection. All because Microsoft had monopoly on de-facto "standards" and is abusing it. Well we don't need you anymore, dying old browser.

Microsoft is putting their customers at risk every time they half ass these standards like they love to do. Companies spend a lot of time and money to develop these lovely web apps that only work for IE version X, then find out that because IE X+1 is trying to finally conform to standards their current app is broken. Whether we like to admit it or not, IE is getting better at security issues, but many of their customers can't upgrade b/c they built the POS that is IE 6. I have seen this again and again i

So much fucking FUD, people.
Windows XP (Server 2003/R2 is still mainstream, but they won't port IE9 to it becaus of the same reasons like they did with 2000 and IE 7), is in extended support, which means no more new features, just security updates until 2014.
Now, if you'd like those features, Microsoft has a program in which you pay the devs extra to port it to (insert older Windows OS here).

Problem with that little theory is that the "pull" is stronger in the other direction. If you're running XP and IE8, and you need SVG, instead of paying $100 to upgrade to IE9, you'll just download FF or Chrome and Microsoft loses more browser share.

Never heard of DirectX, did you? XP doesn't have Windows Presentation Foundation (which uses DirectX for acceleration btw), but this is hardly the same as not having GPU support.
I'm fairly sure MS made the conscious decision to build IE9 on top of this new framework so it wouldn't be compatible with XP.
Understandably, because why would people upgrade to Vista/Win7 when they can get all the goodies for naught?
If they only wanted to do hardware acceleration, that w

That's not FUD, it's a realistic worldview. Whenever MS can do something to force people to upgrade, or buy an 'Ultimate' edition, they do.

For instance, instead of fixing Vista they released Windows 7, merely proving that if you bought Vista you're fucked. Similarly, hackers have proven time and again that these "can't be backported" issues are a total lie when they accomplish what MS itself "can't".

Agreed. The new browser probably won't run on XP such that people will be forced to buy Windows 7 to run MS's newer browser.

And you think this is a BAD thing? So Mr. Linux what version of the kernel are you running? 1.0? Which dist, Ubuntu 1.0? I bet your Linux install isn't a 10 year old operating system, nor would you even consider running or supporting one that is that old. So why should Microsoft? XP was written a very long time ago before any of this intertubes stuff ever was even popular. The sooner MS can kill it off, the better the entire planet will be. The only thing that MS should kill off sooner is IE6.

2) I don't know how old you are. If you are old enough, you may recall a period in human (and computing) history referred to as "the Nineties." It was a rough-and-tumble era in which browsers fought and bled and died, when this whole newfangled "dot com" thing happened and people all around the globe started using all kinds of intertubes-type stuff. Windows XP, by the way, was not around back then.

Yes, but a 2.4 kernel (10 years old) can run all userspace programs that the 2.6 kernel can. And I likely suspect that the 2.2 and 2.0 kernels wouldn't have problems, though I don't feel like firing up a VM to find out. I think the only kernels that would have problems would be the ones that only ran a.out instead of ELF, and you have to go back 15 years (prior to 1.2) to do that.

I thought we'd addressed this point? The question is not when was XP released, it was when did they stop shipping it. They were selling it concurrently with Vista for netbooks and you can still buy machines from companies like Dell with XP preinstalled, and checking it seems that they are still licensing XP for ULCPCs until October 22, 2010.

A typical Linux user would probably be quite upset if his distribution started including software that didn't run on a version of Linux that they were shipping. A M

It's a lot more common than you think.Visual Basic has morphed into so many incompatible things over the years that a few places keep Win98 machines with a specific version of VB just to run a single undocumented app put together by a guy with a few dozen papers to his name too busy running a company or University department to update it.The oddest thing I've got like that (apart from the scientific single purpose VB apps) is a plot server for a specific type of vector graphics running on a SparcStation 5 t

You run into problems here if the systems you have to support are 15 to 25 years old though, and the software to support them does not run under anything newer than Windows XP. And telling the customer he has to rip out his whole infrastructure and replace it by something new (and to pay for it) gets ugly very fast.We still keep some Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 boxes around for those tasks though.